Coding in Elementary: A Professional Learning Resource for Ontario Educators

- plot points using all four quadrants of the Cartesian coordinate plane

The Arts: Visual Arts
- use elements of design in art works to communicate ideas, messages, and understandings for a specific audience and purpose; Fundamental Concepts - analogous colours; Principles of Design - unity and harmony.

how to graph coordinates in the four quadrants of the Cartesian plane
definition of analogous colours (analogous colours are groups of three colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel)

These lessons provide opportunities for teachers and students to gather evidence of learning through teacher, peer, and self-assessments; and learning goals and success criteria. See Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario Schools, Chapter 4 for more information.

Display an image of the colour wheel and ask pairs of students to identify groupings of analogous colours.

Display the following images of famous paintings off the Internet and ask pairs of students to identify groupings of analogous colours used by the artists:
• “Sunflowers” by Van Gogh
• “The Menin Road, World War 1 battlefield” by Paul Nash
• “Girl Reading” by Renoir
• “Big Raven” by Emily Carr
• “The Pool” by Tom Thomson

Discussion of Cartesian plane.

Distribute task cards with coordinates to pairs of students. Display a labelled, blank Cartesian plane on a SmartBoard or chart paper and ask the students to plot their points.

Set up Sprites
Students will use Scratch to position four sprites (cat, frog, shark, starfish) on the Scratch stage using graphing coordinates that are displayed in the bottom right of the stage.

They will write a program to have the sprites change their costumes to analogous colours.

Make the Costumes On the stage, position the sprites as follows:

ANIMAL

X-POSITION

Y-POSITION

Cat

-145

95

Frog

150

120

Shark

-100

-50

Starfish

110

35

Select one of the sprites.

Choose the Costumes tab.

Right click on the sprite in the Costumes area, and select Duplicate.

Name the new costume Costume 2, or Shark 2, etc.

Click on Costume 2 to select it

Click on the Colour A Shape tool (paint can fill tool)

Choose a colour from the palette that is analogous to the colour in Costume. Click on all the parts of the sprite to paint it the new colour
Repeat this process to create a second costume for all four sprites.

Program the Costume Change
Write a script for the cat, using the following blocks:

Fewer sprites could be used.
Fewer quadrants of the Cartesian plane could be used.

Students will chose one of the famous paintings from the Minds On activity and write a paragraph to respond to the following prompt:
• Describe one part of the painting which uses analogous colours.
• Explain how this relates to one of the Unity and Harmony design principles.

• Looking at the whole painting, how does the use of colour and design influence the mood of the image.

• Students could create a longer script to gamify the colour change. For example, an object could bounce at random around the stage and when it touches a sprite, the costume change could occur.

• Students could create a longer script to have the sprites move and interact with each other, triggering speech bubbles and costume changes.

• Students could choose different sprites and create original scenarios or games that involve costume or background colour changes.